I just finished reading the new book by Viktor Farcic called DevOps Paradox. It’s a departure from Victor’s previous writing which was mostly focused on DevOps tooling. In a way this book can be seen as an extension of his DevOps Paradox podcast.
Viktor is a notorious conference speaker and an all-round great communicator. And ‘DevOps Paradox’ is basically the outcome of him traveling around the world, catching the industry’s leading speakers, writers and thinkers, getting them into the corner and attacking them with uncomfortable questions.
With his main question being: “What the hell is DevOps?!”
Isn’t it funny that 10 years after Patrick Debois coined the word we’re still trying to answer that question? And that’s exactly the paradox that the book’s title describes.
The interviewees are all experienced IT professionals. Each of them has their own prism for looking at DevOps. But somehow they all seem to agree that most of the industry is getting DevOps wrong.
Which led me to think that when one says ‘DevOps’ today, they basically mean “the right way to develop and operate software”. With the right way being whatever they’ve learned to be right – based on their personal experience in the industry.
For some folks this would mean using Lean practices. For others it would be automating all the things. Still for others that would mean building resilience or observability into their architectures.
With whoever isn’t doing it right being seen as ‘non-DevOps’.
Which basically defeats all attempts at defining what ‘DevOps’ is.
Many of the interviews basically say the following: in most places nothing has changed beside the names. Take this quote from Julian Simpson for example:
I expected that a configuration management tool would be adopted by developers, so it was possible for a systems person and a developer to collaborate, but I didn’t expect that a bunch of classic systems administration teams would just rebrand to DevOps because there were similarities with some tools. I didn’t expect to have what I’d traditionally think of as a configuration management team become a DevOps team.
I was on a configuration management team in 2006, so I know exactly what Julian is talking about!
And this is what makes ‘DevOps Paradox’ a great read – it is as non-dogmatic as one could get, truly highlighting a paradox. But on the other side it excels at presenting the very essence of what makes DevOps so hard – the mystery of human collaboration. If DevOps experts and thought leaders can’t agree on what it is we’re trying to do here – then how can you expect folks from different teams, with different incentives and business goals to agree on a common definition of what is right?!
Additional plus – the book is very honest. Viktor’s conversations with colleagues are filled with sincere desire to make things work better and heartfelt pain of seeing so many ‘DevOps transformations’ go terribly wrong.
To sum things up – you should read this book if you’d like some deep insight on:
- Human collaboration
- Cloud Architecture
- Continuous Delivery
- and the general state of the IT industry in the last decade
This being a collection of interviews – there were a few I found more interesting than others. Specifically recommended – interviews by Julia Biro, Kevin Behr, Jeff Sussna, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Damon Edwards and Julian Simpson.
Thanks a lot to Victor and Packt publishing for trusting me with this review and providing a preview copy of the book.